Video cameras (or camcorders) are devices that are popular with amateur videographers for home use. Video cameras may be a digital camera, which stores digital video on a memory device, or an analog video camera, which stores video footage on magnetic videotape. Video footage captured by an analog video camera may be converted into digitized format using well-known techniques. Digital video may be processed using a software running on a computing devices (such as personal computers) to edit and manipulate the data captured by video cameras.
The traditional home digital video paradigm expects a user to shoot good video, perform tedious video editing, and then output a single large video containing the edited movie. This paradigm, however, suffers from several problems. One problem is that good video that is enjoyable to watch is difficult to photograph or shoot. Home digital video is overwhelmingly shot by amateur videographers. These amateurs generally have little training in shooting video and consequently frequently make poor decisions about what and how to shoot video. The result is video footage that is difficult to watch.
Another problem is that raw video footage, even when professionally photographed, is difficult and tedious to edit. Professional editors with professional training and using high-end editing tools can take hour to edit raw video into a final version that is just minutes in duration. Moreover, most raw video footage is boring and poring over hours of raw video is quite a tedious task, especially for an amateur.
Yet another problem is that current video editing software for amateur use is modeled after professional editing systems. This tends to make the software difficult for the average consumer to use. User interfaces of current video editing software typically provide a user with one view of the raw video footage. A timeline is placed along side the footage to give the user temporal orientation. The timeline may include several different “tracks”, such as a video 1 track, a video 2 track, an audio 1 track, and so forth. The user interface includes controls similar to a VCR, such as play, fast-forward and rewind buttons. Using these buttons, a user browses the video footage by moving back and forth across the footage using the controls. This process of browsing the video footage is called “scrubbing”.
Once a user finds interesting video footage, beginning and ending cuts are placed on the timeline. Between these two cuts is the video footage that the user wants to keep. This process of placing cuts on the video footage may be repeated for other portions of the video footage. This editing process of scrubbing the video to determine the location of cuts in the video footage is a tedious, repetitive and time-consuming task and must be performed manually. Thus, for the average consumer the editing process of video is a difficult and burdensome task.
Another problem is that digitized video is often large and consequently is difficult to manipulate and edit using a computer because of the amount of memory and processing power required. Large videos can take long periods of time to upload and download. In addition, because of their size, editing large videos can tax the resources of even high-end home computers.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a home digital video paradigm that is forgiving of poor video shooting skills, provides less tedious, shorter and easier editing of video, and alleviates the need to work with cumbersome large videos.